“Wait a second,” said Yablon. “There’s no official word that those whales died of starvation.”
“The people I talked to believe they did.”
“Your people? English-lit students working at Sea World for the summer?”
“I had to start somewhere,” said Weiss. “And you forgot Helga Knuttsen.”
“Another fine example of the scientific mainstream,” said Yablon. “What about Ted Adamski? Why didn’t you start with him?”
“We aren’t on speaking terms.”
“He thinks the whales are suffering from an unidentified virus,” said Yablon.
“Ted Adamski is a paid debunker of the truth,” said Weiss.
Yablon smiled obscenely. There was no reason to mention the old court battle between Adamski and Weiss. The smile said it all.
“He’s still a paid debunker of the truth,” Weiss insisted.
“All right,” said Yablon. “Let’s suppose the whales did starve to death. What makes this any more than a typical August, slow news story?”
Weiss looked at Tucker and rolled his eyes as if asking heaven what he had done to be cursed with working for such an imbecile. Tucker shrugged.
“Right whales eat phytoplankton. Little plants,” Weiss added sarcastically. “But those little plants contribute as much oxygen to the atmosphere as all the rain forests in Africa and South America. In other words, Ed: The story isn’t one of no plankton, no right whales. The story is no plankton, no oxygen, and no oxygen, no fucking human race!”
Yablon let out a genuinely amused laugh. He leaned back in his chair and puffed smoke out of both sides of his mouth.
“Who told you that one?” he said.
“Peter Karlis. He’s a professor at Colorado State University.”
“That’s great.” Yablon’s laugh grew heartier. “You want this network to broadcast a story that sounds damned alarming, if not outright apocalyptic, on the say-so of a whale expert located in the goddamn Rocky Mountains?”
“He isn’t a whale expert,” said Weiss. “He’s a meteorologist who once worked for NASA. He’s done lots of studies on the composition of the atmosphere fifty, a hundred, five hundred years in the future. He has computer models showing the depletion of the oxygen supply over different time frames. One of the factors involves a decrease in the total land covered by trees. The other is a decrease in the amount of phytoplankton. He tells me that the rate of plankton decrease already exceeds his worst-case scenario. The whale deaths are scaring the shit out of him.”
Yablon turned back to the window. The orange light had completely left the sky. Atlanta glowed a sickly, muddy yellow in the humid air.
“If you think I will run a story based on Professor Karlis’s doomsday predications, you are sadly mistaken,” he said. “This is a responsible news bureau, not an electronic tabloid.”
Zeke Tucker let out a long, plaintive sigh. He had warned Weiss that Yablon would be dead-set against running a story on Weiss’s latest discovery. It looked as if he had been right.
But Weiss wasn’t finished.
“Trikon International is working on a secret project with environmental ramifications,” he said. “Maybe they have foreseen this problem. Maybe they caused it.”
“Our average viewer doesn’t give a good goddamn about Trikon,” said Yablon.
“We know that.”
“But the average viewer goddamn cares about the whales. We know that, too,” said Weiss. “Look, I can’t prove there is a connection between Trikon and the whale deaths. But I feel it. Trikon’s CEO, Fabio Bianco, is going to Trikon Station on the aerospace plane. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I want to be on that flight.”
Yablon pulled the cigar out of his mouth and studied it closely. Suddenly, Zeke Tucker started to laugh.
“What the hell’s so funny, Zeke?” Weiss snapped.
“You on the space plane?” Tucker struggled to form words around his laughter. “You don’t even have a driver’s license because you don’t like cars.”
“You’re being a real pal, Zeke.”
Yablon’s chair squealed as he slowly rocked back and forth. Tucker’s laughter died away into stifled snorts of amusement.
“Fabio Bianco’s going up to Trikon Station?” Yablon muttered. “Are you sure?”
“I have it on the best authority. His personal secretary when he’s in New York was once a big fan of mine. She told me about the arrangements.”